Estelle Getty: 1923 - 2008

'Golden Girl' a late bloomer

LOS ANGELES — Estelle Getty, whose acting career bloomed late in life with her Emmy-winning performance as Sophia Petrillo, the wisecracking mother of Bea Arthur on the popular NBC sitcom "The Golden Girls," died Tuesday. She was 84.

Ms. Getty, who also won notice for her performance on Broadway as Harvey Fierstein's mother in "Torch Song Trilogy," died at her home in Hollywood, said her friend and caretaker, Paul Chapdelaine. Ms. Getty had been battling Lewy body dementia for the last eight or nine years, he said.

"The only comfort at this moment is that although Estelle has moved on, Sophia will always be with us," Betty White, one of Ms. Getty's "Golden Girl" co-stars, said in a statement.

Ms. Getty was a veteran New York stage actress when she came to Los Angeles for the West Coast run of "Torch Song" in 1985, and her managers urged her to try making it in Hollywood.

Six weeks later, she landed the part of Sophia, an elderly woman forced to live with her divorced daughter and her daughter's two friends in Miami.

Though about the same age as Arthur, Ms. Getty put on a wig, makeup and dowdy clothes and for seven years engaged in hilarious verbal combat with her TV daughter, Dorothy Zbornak, who towered over Sophia.

"Our mother-daughter relationship was one of the greatest comic duos ever, and I will miss her," Arthur said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Sophia had many of the show's funniest lines, made even more droll by Ms. Getty's deadpan delivery. The intergenerational free-for-all often left Dorothy in stunned silence, from which she recovered by cooing ominously the name of the retirement home from which her mother had been rescued: "Shady Pines."

Ms. Getty played Sophia for laughs, but she also brought depth to the character. It was her idea that Sophia would always carry a purse because, she said, older women are forced to shed so many possessions in their later years that everything they own ends up in their purses.

In 1988, the year she won an Emmy for her performance as Sophia, Ms. Getty told the Los Angeles Times that she did not know what made her character so popular, but she thought it had something to do with her being so small.

"There's something about people identifying with little people, for various reasons," said the under-5-foot Ms. Getty. She said she also thought that the difference in stature between herself and Arthur set up a comic situation, since Sophia seemed always to be the one telling Dorothy to shut up.